At the cold centre of many of the stories in Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's The Inland Ice is a stewy sense of disappointment. Her characters are usually washed up and reflective, wondering out loud where the love and romance in their life have gone, or indeed whether they were there at all. This commonality of theme is made all the more obvious by the variety of the tales; the collection waltzes between eras, perspectives, genders and states of consciousness, with no two stories showing the same trick to us twice.

The first tale, "Gweedore Girl", is a classic story of a 19th-century servant girl deceived in love, but is rendered curiously myth-like and dreamy, with a narrator who is simple and nameless, as in the traditional fairy tale. At its heart is a childlike sense of wonder that no two loves are the same and a mourning for the passing of enchantment. From here Ni Dhuibhne travels several times to Scandinavia and middle Europe, to the times of Famine and even, in two oddly unsettling tales, into the warped perspectives of a gender-confused couple and a serial-killer, with a detached but authoritative narrative voice.

Running through the collection in small instalments is an adaptation of a tale from Irish folklore simply entitled "The Search for the Lost Husband". It serves to underline the essentially mythic quality of many the tales, and neatly encapsulates Ni Dhuibhne's preoccupation with the relations between men and women. When, at its end, the woman throws over the husband she has been trailing through the collection, it is also a rare moment of proud self-sufficiency.

These stories are not easy reading. There is a constant sense of uneasy nostalgia, with each tale providing a catalogue of change that is mourned rather than celebrated. There is a sense that Ni Dhuibhne, like a metaphysical poet, is trying to provide an anatomy of love and human desire from a perspective that is distant, disappointed, but thorough, nonetheless. The first Phoenix Irish Short

Stories, also edited by David Marcus, appeared last year, and stood apart from the many similar anthologies. It offered a wide variety of writers, established and unpublished, and a similar variety of place, style and personality. This year's collection offers another satisfying pool of writers and experiments.

It kicks off with an astonishingly accomplished and evocative story by

Anthony Glavin, "Transplants", a new and subtle look at Irish immigrants as humorous as it is sad. There are also gems such as a new, faintly magic-realist story from Colum McCann that brings floods of kingfishers to the Irish landscape; a piece from previously unpublished Dermot Ryan that describes beautifully the belligerence of bereavement; and a meaty, perfectly executed story by Claire Keegan that suggests she will go far.

An established writer, Bryan MacMahon, offers a timeless tale of fly-fishing neatly interwoven with the disharmony between generations, while Maxim Crowley, a newcomer, goes for an imperfect but interesting story of ideas with a view inside the twisted mind of a writer of cookbooks. This is a collection that very nearly encompasses the contemporary meaning of the word "Irish", crowded as it is with immigrants to the US and Britain, tales from Korea and Tierra del

Fuego, and the subtle intrusions of sterilisation and canonisation, Aids, and child abuse.

The standard of writing in the Phoenix collection is unfailingly high and the scope impressive, though it fell down a little when it came to contemporary

Ireland: the country presented in the collection is predominantly still one of nuns, priests and saintly tramps, with Our Lady making a regular appearance.

While this sense of Irishness is undoubtedly still valid and worthy of description, the 1996 collection benefitted from a larger dose of contemporary society and less preoccupation with religion and old times.

Still, such a slant does not really damage a very readable and cohesive collection that demonstrates to both British and Irish readers that the Irish short story still deserves its place in the sun. David Marcus here shows a surety of touch and a fine eye for the indefinite limits of both Irishness and the short-story form.

Louise East is a freelance journalist and critic